Harvard Outsources Program to Identify Descendants of Those Enslaved by University Affiliates, Lays Off Internal Staff

Harvard University has laid off its staff in the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program, the unit of its $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative tasked with identifying the direct descendants of those enslaved by Harvard affiliates.

The work will be continued by American Ancestors, which is currently one of HSRP’s external research partners in the work, according to HSRP Director Richard J. Cellini and research fellow Wayne W. Tucker.

Employees were notified Thursday that they had been laid off, effective the same day, per Cellini and Tucker. They were not given any advance notice of the decision and, according to Tucker, rumors of the program’s impending closure only began to circulate Thursday morning.

No additional reasons were given for the HSRP team’s disbanding, according to Tucker. Since September, HSRP has been a focus of public attention after a Crimson investigation reported that Cellini, the director, had accused Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich, who leads the Legacy of Slavery initiative, of instructing HSRP “not to find too many descendants.”

Cellini later repeated his allegations in an op-ed in The Crimson.

The sudden move came just one week after HSRP representatives met with the prime minister and governor general of Antigua and Barbuda to discuss a potential ground research presence in the country after HSRP identified “several hundred people” enslaved in the island nation between the 1660s and 1815.

That number added to the more than 300 individuals enslaved by Harvard affiliates that HSRP had already identified. As of September, HSRP had also identified more than 100 living descendants.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Clarification: January 23, 2025

A previous version of this article stated that the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program had been disbanded. In fact, according to a University spokesperson, the program has not been discontinued, though its employees have been laid off.

—FAS Desk Editor Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15.